A Realized Humanity
by Firehelper
Summary: What if humanity had no access to a mass relay? What if they had to develop on their own. How would things differ? AU
1. Chapter 1

AU. Humanity's first contact will be delayed by four hundred years to 2557. First attempt so comments are always wanted, this is likely to be an overarching narrative throughout. I wanted to show a humanity that had a slightly more realistic expansion into space (still entirely fanciful but a little less so I think) I also recommend that anyone who likes space colonization to read "the high frontier" What people imagined back when we cared about space is amazing.

* * *

The universe has dealt an unfair hand to humanity. With a system lacking element zero, the system had been ignored by the Reapers who, through countless cycles had never seen a race emerge from a system lacking the most basic of materials for galactic society. It was because of this that the Sol system had never been found by anyone, not the reapers during the infancy of human civilization, not the Protheans who had no mass relay to follow, nor any members of the citadel for its distance from the nearest mass relay at Archturus. Yet, though humanity would lack any contact with those that the remainder of the galaxy drew inspiration from, humanity had found other ways to overcome.

In 2065 humanity, long dependent on fossil fuels, had depleted a large number of its recourses in the unchecked economic growth of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and over the course of the fifty years leading up to 2065 the world descended into an increasing number of bush wars as peak oil in the middle east caused an increase in radicalism as government struggled to cope with losses of income and the remainder of the world competing for an ever decreasing supply of fossil fuels. Amidst this two large blocks headed by America and China emerged in a second cold war.

Building tensions finally ended in World War after a terrorist attack on Hangzhou was blamed on the United States. The conventional war, breaking out in an invasion of South Korea and Japan by China and a counter invasion of China's ally Russia by NATO forces resulted in a quick stalemate with tactical nuclear weapons being used liberally. Following two years of bloody war, culminating in a failed amphibious invasion of Seattle by Chinese forces, America launched a submarine launched nuke at Beijing resulting in six million deaths and a counterstrike from a submarine off the east coast of America. Rapid tit-for-tat exchanges of nuclear weapons quickly reduced a large number of the major cities in China and America to rubble before the remaining government members agreed in secret to meet and discuss peace. What was agreed was the most decisive plan for human reconciliation in the history of humanity, the treaty of Bern. This treaty ended the largest war in human history, with one billion dead (10% of the human population) and a large portion of the world destroyed.

The treaty of Bern would lay out a vision for the future of humanity and a path to total reconciliation spanning multiple generations. It would start with a return to the status quo ante bellum and a rebuilding of the world. It would also, at the same time, redirect military spending to the colonization of space, long since universally recognized to be the only viable way to sustain, both the growing human population and its need for resources. It terminated in an agreement to establish a jointly run space program dedicated to the eventual colonization of space in the vision of Gerald K. O'Neill.

One would think that human interests would destroy the framework of the treaty, and several times it almost did, but the memory of world war tempered everyone, both in rebuilding, and in looking to the stars. Amidst this, an African union, a secular government emerging out of local civil wars following the Peak Oil crisis of 2030 that resulted in Canada becoming one of the world's largest remaining suppliers of crude oil, elected to join the joint space program, bringing the whole of the world, minus several rouge nation states into the goal of reaching for the stars.

With humanity united behind this one drive outlined in the Treaty of Bern, the colonization of space was finally a political reality. The first step in reaching for the stars would be the establishment of a reusable shuttle, regularly used. Indeed the reason the space shuttle became so uneconomical was due to the limited number of flights it conducted following the Columbia disaster. This shuttle would be used to construct and man the station Destiny, launching from the American sphere of influence in Venezuela. The second part would the establishment of a mass driver for launching of raw materials. This was established in the Australian desert, much closer to the refining facilities in India and China not destroyed by nuclear fire.

The desire for space became humanity's drive to recover from the third world war. Indeed, even after the perfecting of fusion in 2073 solving a large proportion of the ongoing energy crisis, humanity did not lose the drive to go to space. Humanity established an outpost on the moon as a mining center and then moved on to construct an automated resource collection center at Lagrange point 2. This small station would help construct the greatest human achievement of the 22nd century, the station Destiny. This station, not finished until 2100, was of the Stanford Torus variety and provided a home for 10,000 people while also acting as the human gateway to the stars. This station would be the center of human expansion to space acting as a space dock and a fabrication center for the raw resources being sent from the Australian mass driver.

The creation of the station destiny started the process called the Human Exodus. Being the first station at L5, the population was composed of a representative population of the contributing nations of earth and formed a symbol of a united humanity. This station would quickly be followed by one other Stanford Torus before the Bern Oversight committee moved to O'Neill's island 3 design, a station thirty kilometers long and able to hold ten million people in comfort. The largely self sufficient solar communities began to construct several of these stations at once at Earth's Lagrange points as more adventurous people began to settle on small Martian communities, gas giant refuelling stations or Luna, which by 2164 had a population of thirty million people resulting in large cities visible from earth during new moons.

At a rate of construction of four Island-3 colony sets per decade, with each set containing two colonies each containing ten million people, per decade, humanity, by 2300 had over one billion people living in space colonies and another five hundred million living on the moon with a total population of 14 billion people. It was at this point that the governments of earth united under one banner, the banner of the System Alliance.

With theconstruction of megastructures, multiple billion ton space colonies and several orbital elevators (that also secretly doubled as mass accelerator cannons) a continual reality, and with a booming scientific and cultural revolution brought about by the energy security in the form of fusion and with an expanding presence in the solar system humanity had entered what was called the golden age of human exploration, the period of time after the perfection of fusion reactors for energy and first contact with aliens.

Human reality, however, began to be shattered with the invention of the Layton-Hyun trans-space drive in 2313 which allowed for rapid travel across the reaches of space, opening the door to human exploration of the universe beyond the sol system.


	2. Chapter 2

AN: I'll begin to include varying number s of codex enteries, likely promted by reviews that want more clarification on s omething. Updates will be sporadic depending on how much time I have. I must also say, its entirely easier to do this sort of overarching narrative than a detailed story given limited time.

* * *

_Codex: Space Elevators_

With the advent of exceedingly large numbers of people living in space, following the rapid construction of O'Neill Island 3 space habitats, the economics of building a space elevator became increasingly apparent to the alliance government as commerce between industrial blocks located at earth's Lagrange points and the ground based economy increased in size. To solve the increasing relative cost of using shuttles as the main means of human transport, even with economies of scale and low earth orbit transfer stations, the construction of the first space elevator in 2250, located at Cayenne in what was formerly French Guyana, was started and finished in thirty years with three other elevators being built around the world in equatorial regions within the next fifty years to facilitate an increasing amount of passenger traffic numbering in the tens of millions per year. Ultimately the investment in space elevators eliminated the need for the large fleet of suborbital shuttles that provided the large majority of transport from 2100 to 2320.

_Classified addendum:_the counterweight station consists of an outer ring with a large hidden magnetic accelerator cannon able to launch a large depleted uranium slug of two thousand tons at a speed of 4% the speed of light, the most powerful weapon ever constructed to date by humanity. Powered through the tether to the ground, the cannon can quickly charge and fire at any determined threat. The addition of the hidden weapon to the station design was agreed upon by the highest governments on earth and the space colonies and the overarching system alliance. The central station transfer point is also reinforced with significant amounts of armor.

This was agreed upon due to evidence gathered by lunar telescopes of anomalous blue shifted radiation found in empty space in lines moving at speeds significantly higher than the speed of light , potentially representing hostile alien races using a hitherto unknown form of FTL travel.

* * *

Advancements in theoretical physics around the turn of the 24th century allowed for the development and testing of the Layton-Hyun trans-space drive developed by two teams of researchers headed by scientists at the University of Toronto and Pudong university coupled with the Alliance Space Research foundation, operating out of a dedicated Bernal Sphere colony in 2313. The Layton-Hyun transspace drive allowed the insertion of a bubble of normal space into what has been termed transpace, finally allowing for the development of faster than light travel. Short jumps of 1 AU had been demonstrated to be safe and effective. However, usage was limited after longer jumps had been demonstrated to be unfeasible with current computing technology.

The technology would lie in disuse, though both Layton and Hyun would receive nobel prizes for their work. This changed in 2340 when Jia Li, a computing researcher from O'Neill University, the top university of the L5 set of space habitats, developed the first functioning AI approved for normal use. This AI was developed out of flash cloned human brains and engrafted with a sense of morality following Asimov's three laws of robotics. Layton would use this development in computing to develop the first reliable long range FTL system. His death in 2342 disallowed him to see the achievement of the first human flight to Proxima Centauri, the first human flight to a star outside of the Sol system.

The System alliance, renamed the Systems alliance, began a drive for interstellar colonization with unmanned probes being sent out to every nearby star. Humanity would find two other colonizable worlds with its initial exploration efforts in the local cluster and these worlds were named Dimitris and Minerva. The two colonies would quickly become self sufficient. The Systems alliance shipyards were expanded to allow for larger ships to be built to transport larger numbers of colonies from the still burgeoning population of Earth. These transport ships averaged a length of one kilometer with size only limited by the efficiency of the civilian grade plasma-torch engines. The Systems alliance navy also increased in size to combat an increasing amount of piracy and to provide adequate protection for the two new colony worlds. The populations on these two planets would quickly grow into the hundreds of millions as popular sentiment on a populated earth drove people to the stars, and where expansion was previously limited by the number of habitable space colonies that could be constructed, the new main bottleneck in expansion was the ability to transfer large number of people between planets.

Human exploration of the area closest to the Sol system eventually found itself at Arcturus and there humanity finally had confirmation of life outside of its own system. At Arcturus, humanity found one small forked device and one larger forked device of unknown purpose and origin. This discovery shifted the mindset of humanity towards potential contact with outside forces. Humanity began both a concerted scientific effort to unravel both the operation of the devices, termed Arcturus Forks after their origin system and a military effort to prepare itself against any potential external threat. An additional effort to discover potential applications of the material termed element zero. A modified O'Neill cylinder was built orbiting Archturus and a secondary fuel recovery station around the gas giant found orbiting the moon to provide helium 3 for the operation of ships allowing for six years of nonstop work on the forks before their secrets finally unraveled before human scientists.

In 2361 humanity found that the small relay linked to a set of equivalent relays throughout the local cluster, though the Sol system was not among those with a relay two of the relays linked to clusters habitable worlds with discovered quantities of element zero and one other relay moved from an area with minimal economic worth to the Sol system. The larger fork was found to travel several thousand years deeper into the core at a speed far exceeding the current achieved speeds using the transspace drive. This discovery transformed Arcturus into the second most important system behind sol itself because it formed the center of human colonization efforts, an effort that no longer required large ships to allow for the economical travel of thousands between the colonized planets and earth.

By 2400 humanity had expanded to another seven systems with multiple mining facilities in other systems centered around the Arcturus hub. The overpopulation crisis on earth had finally been averted and human human growth rate increased to 4% per year with a total human population of 24 billion across ten systems. The last colonized planet, Shaanxi was also one of of the first discovered habitable worlds colonized two after the large jump from the Arcturus hub to the next hub close to the core of the galaxy. Shaanxi quickly became a thriving frontier colony with a population of four hundred million spread across three continents with an economy based off of the exploitation of extensive deposits of element zero.

In 2557 explorers to system A-342, six light years from Shaanxi found the presence of a large relay and a small expedition was soon sent from Shaanxi to the relay by the Systems Alliance to attempt to activate the relay and travel through. This action was stopped in what has since been called the first contact war.

* * *

_Codex: Human Usage of Element Zero_

Widespread usage of element zero by humanity has been limited by health factors and impetus in alternative technologies. Following the discovery of element zero it was quickly discovered that an electric charge could induce mass changes in surrounding objects. However, following a series of cancer outbreaks following the destruction of a cargo shuttle over Singapore, its usage in civilian applications was quickly outlawed leaving the military as the sole consumer of element zero. In this regard the military used element to alter the mass of their ships and in the development of compact weaponry for infantry. And while there would never be sufficient mass reduction on multi-kilometer military ships, the usage of a light mass effect field dramatically increases the maneuverability of ships outfitted with military grade anti-proton thrusters. Thus, while mass effect technology might have the ability to greatly impact the economy, its use is limited by the deemed health risks to poses to the human population at large.


End file.
